


Cause and Effect

by Ladybug_21



Category: Miss Fisher's Murder Mysteries, Shetland (TV)
Genre: Backstory, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-29
Updated: 2019-12-29
Packaged: 2021-02-27 13:14:26
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 750
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22017709
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ladybug_21/pseuds/Ladybug_21
Summary: Cora had always liked poking at dead things, but it took a visit from a long-lost great-aunt for her to realise that she could make a career of it.
Comments: 6
Kudos: 34





	Cause and Effect

**Author's Note:**

> I started watching _Shetland_ a few days ago and this is just a little headcanon that I haven't been able to shake loose. I decided that Cora McLean was the absolute best when she sat on a stone wall and explained to Jimmy Perez over whiskey all the ways you can bash your head in on a rock. And I'm shocked that there isn't more fic about her being awesome. So, rock on, Grumpy Pathologist Grandma.

Cora's mum never quite understood why her daughter was so fascinated by the dead things that she found on long, rambling walks about the beaches of Shetland. Puffin carcasses pecked hollow and left as hard, bony-feathery shells; mangled masses of misshapen legs and claws that were crabs before the guillemots got to them; otters that lay stiff and gnarled in beds of fly-swarmed kelp, their lush pelts matted. The wind whipped sand and sea foam over the lot, leaving them half-exposed, grotesque in their otherness.

It was an odd pastime Cora had—that, the whole family agreed upon. Cora's sister preferred collecting flowers, wave-smoothed rocks, the occasional injured mouse that she could nurse back to health. (When all nursing attempts failed, Cora was there to prod the recently departed mouse, at least until it started decomposing and her mum shouted at her to bury it outside.) They presumed she'd outgrow it, eventually.

But that presumption was upended when Cora's gran died quite suddenly of the flu.

(They didn't let Cora see the body, not until it was preserved and prepared and laid to rest in a coffin. Cora wouldn't have wanted to see it, anyway. Most dead things were objective curiosities to be picked apart and marvelled at. Her gran, Cora simply missed.)

The funeral was held in St Columba's in Lerwick. Cora, squeezed into a pressed frock, dangled her legs off the edge of the pew and let the soles of her slightly-too-tight Mary Janes scuff against the carpeting on the floor of the kirk. Her sister poked her in the ribs, and Cora poked her sister back, but stopped when a stranger turned around to look at the pair of them.

The stranger had beautiful hair the same weight and texture as Gran's, almost faded to white but still shot through with a streak or two of dull red. She also had Gran's eyes, which twinkled in her elegantly wrinkled face at Cora and her sister as they sat there in their Sunday best, sullen and sombre.

"Who's that?" Cora asked her mum, when she sat down next to her two girls.

"Gran's older sister," Cora's mum answered in a whisper. "My aunt Elizabeth. Ran off to Australia when she was a girl and hasnae been back to Scotland since, but wanted to pay her respects, and say her own goodbyes to the Isles, no doubt."

 _Australia!_ Cora could barely keep her mind on the service, so fascinated was she by her exotic great-aunt. After the service ended, when everyone clustered towards the front of the kirk to pay their respects to the family, Cora lingered towards the edge of things, unsure of how to approach the intimidating stranger.

"And you must be Cora," said the stranger finally, turning to the girl. "My sister told me so much about you in her letters. It sounds as if we have a common interest."

"Really?" Cora was flabbergasted that this fascinating woman was even speaking with her, let alone indicating that she thought she had something to share with her awkward great-niece.

"I hear you're quite the amateur scientist," the woman smiled. "Ever thought about medical school?"

"No," replied Cora dully. "I'm not that interested in trying to keep things alive. I much prefer to pick them apart once they're dead."

"Well," shrugged her great-aunt, "not all doctors deal with the sick and injured all the time. I've dabbled in forensic pathology myself, when the need's arisen."

"Forensic pathology?" Cora wrinkled her nose.

"Determining why something died," the stranger clarified. "How a murder was committed, or if one even was. Cause and effect. You might find it interesting."

Cora had a host of follow-up questions about forensic pathology, but at that moment, someone called, "Mac, where've you disappeared to?" and since it was the horribly glamorous woman who had arrived with Cora's great-aunt, her great-aunt politely excused herself and slipped away. Cora didn't have a chance to speak with her again before the funeral wrapped up and all of the off-island guests departed on the ferry.

But from that time onward, whenever Cora knelt down to examine a headless gannet or a decaying fish, she had a name for what she was. _Forensic pathologist_. It was her precious secret, a title conferred upon her by a regal lady from a distant land to the south, a whispered talisman for her ears alone. But one day, Cora swore, she'd make it the title by which she introduced herself to the world.


End file.
